LAPD keeps cool to Trump's deportation promise

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) announced that it would not help deport illegal immigrants despite President-elect Donald Trump's promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants as soon as he took office next year.

LA Police Chief Charlie Beck reassured that the LAPD would not deviate from its long-term stand on immigration enforcement, according to Los Angeles Times Monday, the LAPD was mandated by a special order signed in 1979 not to take part in discovering and deporting illegal immigrants.

Many immigrants and their families fell in fear of deportation ever since Trump became President-elect early this month. Immigration experts said this was not a healthy phenomenon.

"We do not want the community to proceed in fear," Nasim Khansari, Project Director for Asian American Advancing Justice Los Angeles, told Xinhua Tuesday, "We want the community to feel empowered. We hope there will not be psychological impacts on the community."

Trump, who made numerous promises to deport illegal immigrants in his presidential election campaigns, reassured his immigration policy during a 60 Minutes interview last week.

Trump told 60 Minutes interview host Lesley Stahl that he would start deporting 2 to 3 million illegal immigrants with criminal records once he took office next January.

However, Vox, a news media website, called out that Donald Trump had made an impossible promise.

According to a Vox article, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) estimated that there were only about 1.94 million removable criminal illegal immigrants currently living in the U.S.

Nevertheless, Khansari stated that despite Trump may not seem to fully understand the immigration situation of his country, his newly appointed advisors do, so he worried the anti-immigration remarks surrounding Trump would soon become policies.

As of now, Immigration and Customs Enforcement or commonly known as ICE is the main force of handling immigration enforcement matters in the United States.

ICE has the power to deport any non-citizen immigrants who violate the term of their stay, such as committing certain types of crimes, or simply failing to advise authorities of their change of address.

Except of enforcing operations of ICE, since from 1979, LAPD did not handed any undocumented immigrant arrested for low-level offense to federal agents for deportation,

While the exact number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is unknown, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimated that about 11.4 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the country in 2012. Endit